Raul Vaneigem: Insurrection as a politics of life

Posted on December 23, 2019 by Julius Gavroche

Here we are, at the beginning of everything!

Raoul Vaneigem, 17 November 2019

(The text below was published on the 25 of November with the french language A
contretemps).
The sudden attacks of freedom on the suffocating capitalist hydra, constantly
make the epicenter of the seismic disturbances fluctuate. The territories of the
whole world affected by the system of private benefits are exposed to the
outburst of insurrectional movements. Consciousness is forced to run after
successive waves of events, reacting to constant, paradoxically predictable and
unexpected shocks.

Two realities struggle against each other in the face of the violence. One is the
reality of lying. Taking advantage of technological progress, you try to manipulate
public opinion for the benefit of established power. The other is the reality of daily
life of the population.

On the one hand, there are the hollow words of corporate jargon which show the
importance of numbers, surveys and statistics; which teem with false debates
whose proliferation serves to hide the real problems: existential and social
demands. The media windows-screens of deceit spill out each day numerous
tricks and insignificant conflicts of interest which are of no interest to us, but
whose negative consequences affect us. Their profitable wars of devastation are
not ours; they have no other purpose than to dissuade us from waging the only
war that concerns us, the war against the inhumanity prevalent in the world.
On the same side, according to the absurd truth of leaders, things are clear: to
claim the rights of the human being is characteristic of anti-democratic violence.
Democracy would then consist of repressing the people, throwing at them a
horde of police officers who, by developing the impunity guaranteed by the
government and the candidates of the opposition eager to succeed them, incites
fascist inducing behavior. Just imagine the songs of the media zombies if it were
true that the self-immolation of a victim of impoverishment by fire would lead to
the fire of the system responsible for the poverty!

On the other hand, the reality experienced by the people is also clear. We will
never admit that the meaningless of poorly paid work, that the bureaucratic
pressure that increases interest rates and decreases the amount of pensions and
social conquests, that the wage pressure which reduces life to strict survival, can
be reduced for business transactions. The lived reality is not a number, it is a
feeling of unworthiness, it is the feeling of being nothing in the claws of the State,
a monster which shrinks like the skin of a shoe before draining of international
embezzlement money.

Well, in the confrontation between these two realities – the one that imposes the
fetishism of money and the one that speaks in the name of life – a spark, often
tiny, came to light the fuse.

There is no futility today, however small, that is not capable of unleashing the
violence contained in repressed life, in the life determined to break everything
that threatens to extinguish it.

Secular inertia and lethargy, under the aegis of the ancient “bread and circus”
recipe, are the basis of the tremendous power of voluntary servitude. Denounced
in the 16th century by La Boétie, it remains our most ruthless enemy. By
attacking us from the inside, voluntary servitude promotes an inclination among
many that functions as if it were a drug: the will to exercise power, to assume the
role of guide. Frequently, the morbidity of the authority of a few has infected the
libertarian media, so we should congratulate the determination of the yellow vests
and other insurgents of everyday life to constantly evoke their rejection of
leaders, of self-appointed delegates, of masters of thought and of pond frogs of
the holy water of politics and labour unionism.

Free are those who are happy to die in peace while waiting for death in the
combined comfort of the coffin and of television, but we will not let their self-
spoiling infect over our will to live.

We want the sovereignty of the human being, no more no less.

Impoverishment knocks on doors with increasing violence, threatening to bring
them down. The hedonism of the recent past which crushed us with the
consumerist and government slogan is over: “Take advantage of today, tomorrow
will be worse!” The worst is already today, especially if we continue to welcome it.
We must stop believing in the omnipotence of capitalism and the fetishism of
money. We have noticed that the great macabre farce that makes the world
dance is the result of a sordid motivation, that of short-term profit, that of the
absurd rapacity of a bankrupt merchant scratching at the back of the drawers in
the search for more.

I’m not talking about hope. It is only the lure of despair. I am referring to all the
regions of the world where an insurrection of everyday life – call it what you like –
is trying to dismantle the dictatorship of private profit and to overthrow the States
which impose it on the people they claim to represent. What we want is not for
tomorrow, but for today, as caregivers, nurses, emergency doctors, paramedics
and doctors who deal with the economic management that dehumanises the
health care sector so well expressed [in the ongoing general strike in france].

The system of exploitation of terrestrial and human nature goes beyond all
horizons. The mantle of profitability, at all costs, closes off all expressions of the
generosity of life and the human feeling that promotes its practice.

Obviously, the exploiters and the exploited are convinced that the pot is about to
explode. Violence is unavoidable. The problem does not lie with it. The approach
to resolve the matter without ambiguity is based on an alternative.

Will we tolerate the social explosion leading to a state of endemic civil war, a
chaos of revenge and hatred which will ultimately only benefit multinational
mafias, already at liberty to continue with impunity and even to destroy
themselves with their lucrative desertification project?

Or are we going to create micro-societies freed from the tyranny of the State and
commodities, federated territories where the intelligence of individuals can get rid
of this herd individualism in search of a supreme guide who will lead them to the
slaughterhouse? Are we finally going to take the reins of our own destiny and
outline a clear plan for this social jungle, where the beasts of burden have no
more freedom than that to choose the prey which will devour them?

In 1888, Octave Mirabeau wrote: “Lambs go to the slaughterhouse. They say

nothing and expect nothing. But at least they don’t vote for the butcher who will
kill them or the bourgeois who will eat them. Worse than animals, more crowded
than sheep, the voter chooses his butcher and chooses his bourgeois. S/he made
revolutions to conquer the right to do so.”

Have they not transformed you from generation to generation with the same
indescribable currency: heads, the baton of order; tails, the humanitarian lie?

There is no “vote of the lesser evil”, there is only a totalitarian democracy, which
only the direct democracy exercised by the people and for the people will revoke.
I was amused by the passage of a slogan which, however rough it may be, calls
for a further reflection: “Macron, Le Pen, Mélenchon, the same fight of fools! “(I
would have preferred “the same fight of capons”; but the rejection of all forms of
power and dialogue with the State is one of those little pleasures from which
come the great waves of individual and collective enjoyment).

Autonomy, self-organisation, self-defence

The authorities in power will not tolerate the people being freed from their
tyranny. We must prepare for a long struggle. That to be carried out against
voluntary servitude will be such a struggle. The only foundation that despotism
can take advantage of is the acrimony over security of the resigned, it is the
suicidal resentment of a supposedly silent majority who screams their hatred of
life.

The best defense is always offensive. To this principle, amply demonstrated by

military tradition, I would like to substitute that of openness, because, to the
advantage of breaking up of the encirclement is added the pleasure of breaking
up the barracks in which we find ourselves.

The openness to life, we see it at work in the fierce determination of the current
insurrections. Even if some of them die out, they start again more powerfully. We
can see it in the festive nature of the protests which endure, despite the fact that
they are met with the blindness, the deafness, the repressive rage of
governments. It was on the basis of this openness that I spoke of insurgent
pacifism.

Insurrectionary pacifism is neither peaceful, in the bleating sense of the term, nor
insurrectional, if one understands by this the aberrations of urban and Guevarist
guerrillas.

I have neither the vocation of a warrior nor of a martyr. I leave it to life and its
poetry to overcome opposites so that they do not become nuisances, so that they
escape the Manichean duality of pros and cons. I rely on the creativity of
individuals to invent a revolution of which there is no example in the past. The
disarray and the uncertainties of a civilization which is born have nothing in
common with the disarray of a civilization which has only the certainty of dying.

Philosophers, sociologists, experts of thought, spare us your endless discussions

on the malignity of capitalism which makes its agony profitable. Everyone agrees
on this point, even the capitalists. The real issues, however, have not been
addressed. These are those of the base, those of villages and urban
neighbourhoods, those of our own body, which is all the same, it must be
remembered, the real decision maker of our destiny, right?

The more the struggles spread worldwide, the more their meaning gains in
radicality, in depth, in lived experience, the more they dispense with militant
engagement, the more they mock intellectuals, specialists in subversive or
reactionary manipulation (because manipulation deals with both like two sides of
the same coin). It is both in their existential experience and in their social function
that individuals discover themselves on the ground where their aspiration to live
begins to undermine and clear away the wall which counting of profits confronts
them with, as if their fate stopped there.

No, we can no longer speak of abstract man, the only one recognised by
statistics, budgetary calculations, the rhetoric of those who – laymen or religious,
humanists or racists, progressives or conservatives – who have others beaten,
blinded, imprisoned, massacred, while, lurking in their cowardly ghettos, they
count on the arrogant cretinism of money to ensure their impunity and their
security.

The dictatorship of profit is an aggression against the body. Entrusting in life the
care of immunising us against the financial canker that corrupts our flesh implies
a poetic and united struggle. Nothing like the fires of the joy of living to reduce the
morbidity of the world to ashes! The revolution has therapeutic virtues,
unsuspected until today.

Ecologists, why bother bawling at States for climate improvement when the same
States taunt you by polluting more every day, and when it is urgent to act on a
field where the questions have nothing to do with intellectual niceties. Questions
such as:

How to move from land poisoned by the food industry to its renaturation by
permaculture?

How to ban pesticides without harming the peasant who, trapped by Monsanto,
Total and others, destroys her/his health by destroying that of others? How to
rebuild on a new basis small village and neighborhood schools that the State has
ruined and banned to promote concentration camp-like education?

How to boycott harmful and useless products that advertising harassment tells us
to buy?

How to constitute local investment banks where the currency of exchange will
compensate opportunely for monetary collapse and the planned financial crash?

How to cut short the tax levies that the State allocates to bank fraud, and
undertake to invest them in the self-financing of local and regional projects?

Above all, how to spread everywhere the principle of a gratuitousness that life
claims by nature and that the fetishism of money distorts. Free trains and public
transport, free healthcare, free housing and self-construction, gradual free local
craft and food production.

Utopia? Is there a worse utopia than the hodgepodge of absurd and deleterious
projects unpacked, before the tired eyes of television viewers, these talented
false actors who stir the specter of their wars of traveling salesmen, endlessly
reiterating the antics of the combat of chiefs, veiling the real existential and social
questions under false debates, overshadowing state terrorism by a terrorism of
trivialities where suicidal madness grows with pauperisation and an increasingly
unbreathable ambient air?

Have we not realised enough that, in their diversity, even in their divergences, the
yellow vests and protest movements formed a formidable pressure group capable
of boycotting, blocking, paralysing, destroying everything that pollutes, poisons,
impoverishes, threatens our life and our environment? To make us underestimate
our power and our creativity comes from the democratic mechanisms of state and
market tyranny. More than its gendarmes, the illusory force of the State rests on a
propaganda effect which urges us at every moment to give up the poetic power
which is in us, this force of life which no tyranny will overcome.

Now, during this time …In Chile, the fight against the vermin which proliferates on
the corpse of Pinochet has rekindled the awareness that everything must start
from the base, that the representatives of the people are not the people, that the
individualist manipulated by the gregarious spirit is not the individual capable of
thinking for her/himself and taking the side of life against the side of money that
kills. It is necessary to leave to the people the conquest of an intelligence which
belongs to them and which the various forms of power endeavor to remove from
them.

The same is true in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq. I trust Rojava to transform its
temporary retirement into an offensive. The Zapatistas, for their part, responded
to the socialist arguments of the socialist Lopez Obrador by increasing the
number of their bases (caracoles) and their Councils of good government, where
decisions are made by the people and for the people.

The obstinate demand for a democracy in Hong-Kong oscillates between on the

one hand a blind anger, ready to be satisfied with a parliamentarism everywhere
else put into questioned, and on the other hand a lucid anger which shakes and
makes tremble by its persistence the gigantic pyramid of the totalitarian Chinese
regime (which worries about the threat of a financial crash). Who knows? The ivy
permeates everywhere, and the insurgent past of Shanghai is not far away.

Sudan shakes off the yoke of tyranny and military power, Iran falters. Lebanon is
a wake-up call for Hezbollah and for Islamism, the defrocking of which no longer
obscures the politico-oil objective. Algeria does not want a government face-lift.
Iraq discovers that social reality outweighs the importance given to religious
rivalries. There remain the Catalans, the only ones who want a state when the
“coldest of cold monsters” is riddled with arrows everywhere. But it is not
impossible that the separatists, engaged in an impasse by the standoff opposing
the Madrid state to the no less statist Generalitat, suddenly breathe the ruffles of
the Franco corpse that the nationalist spirit has taken out of its cemeteries. So it
is not impossible that the memory of the libertarian communities of the revolution
of 1936, where real independence was forged, will come back to them before the
Communist Party and its ally, the Catalan State, crush them.

It’s only a dream but life is a dream and we have entered an era where poetry is
the passage from dream to reality, a passage which marks the end of the
nightmare and its valley of tears.

Opening a vital space to those paralyse the dismay and anxiety of the future, is it
not poetic practice that makes the insolent novelty of the insurrection of everyday
life? Do we not see it in the loss of militancy, in the erosion of this old military
reflex which multiplies the little chiefs and their frightened herds?

Under the diversity of its pretexts, the only demand that is expressed today
without reservation is full and whole life.
Who would be wrong? We are not in the tumult of foreseeable or unexpected
revolts, we are in a revolutionary process. The world changes base, an old
civilization collapses, a new civilization appears. Compassionate mentalities and
archaic behaviors may be perpetuated under an ersatz of modernity, a new
Renaissance is nevertheless emerging within a history whose inhumanity
collapses into chaos before our eyes. And these eyes are slowly opening. They
discover in women, men and children a genius to innocently experiment with
incredible innovations, unusual energies, forms of resistance to death, universes
that no imagination had dared to set in motion in the past.

Here we are where, at the beginning of everything!